Jonathan's Space Report No. 446 10 Feb 2001

Progress M1-4 undocked from Zarya's nadir port at 1126 UTC on Feb 8.
According to Chris van den Berg, it was deorbited over the Pacific
and reentered at 1350 UTC the same day.

Atlantis rolled out to the pad on Jan 26 after further wiring checks.
Launch occurred on Feb 7 at 2313:02 UTC. The solid rocket boosters
separated at 2315 UTC and the main engines cut off at 2321 UTC, followed
10 seconds later by separation of the external tank. The Orbiter and the
ET were then in a 74 x 323 km x 51.6 deg orbit; the spacecraft was
easily visible from Harvard as it passed above the Boston skyline. At
2357 UTC the OMS engines fired for the OMS-2 burn which raised Atlantis'
orbit to 204 x 322 km x 51.6 deg while the ET fell back for impact in
the Pacific. Atlantis docked with Station at 1651 UTC on Feb 9. Docking
was at the PMA-3 port on Unity's nadir.

Crew of STS-98 are Ken Cockrell (commander), Mark Polansky (pilot),
Robert Curbeam, Marsha Ivins and Thomas Jones (mission specialists).
Polansky was a support crewmember on the Chandra/STS-93 mission and
those of us on the Chandra team congratulate him on his first
spaceflight.

Meanwhile, Discovery is now in the VAB and has been connected to
the external tank in preparation for mission STS-102.

On Feb 8, Mir was in a 275 x 296 km x 51.6 deg orbit. Perigee
has been decreasing at about 1 km/day.

Launch was at 0755 UTC; the Delta stage two, powerered by an Aerojet
AJ10-118K liquid N2O4/AZ-50 engine, entered a 175 x 390 km x 36.9 deg
parking orbit at 0806 UTC. It restarted at 0815 UTC to raise the orbit
to 189 x 1265 km x 37.2 deg (prelaunch estimate) and released the third
stage; most of the second stage depletion burn went into a plane change,
after which the second stage was in a 169 x 1277 km x 32.6 deg orbit.
The Thiokol Star 48B solid motor propelled the payload into a 160 x
20397 km x 39.1 deg transfer orbit and separated at 0820 UTC. On its
10th transfer orbit apogee, GPS SVN 54 fired its onboard Thiokol Star
37FM solid apogee motor and entered a 20104 x 20266 km x 55.0 deg orbit.
The orbit will be refined to an 11hr 58min period (half of the
geostationary period). The satellite will transmit navigation signals as
PRN 18 and will be placed in slot E4 of the GPS system. SVN 54 was built
by Lockheed Martin/Sunnyvale. The GPS program is managed by USAF SMC at
Los Angeles AFB, and the satellites are operated by 2 SOPS (the 2nd
Space Operations Squadron of USAF Space Command) at Schriever AFB,
Colorado.

Arianespace launched an Ariane 44L from Kourou just minutes before the
launch of STS-98 from Kennedy Space Center - it's very unusual for CSG
and KSC/CCAFS launches to be so close together because they often share
downrange tracking, although the high inclination Shuttle launch didn't
clash. The Ariane carried Skynet 4F, a communications satellite for the
UK Ministry of Defense, and Sicral, (Sistema Italiana de Communicazione
Riservente Allarmi) a communications satellite for the Italian defense
ministry's procurement division, the Segretariato Generale della
Difesa's Direzione Nazionale degli Armamenti. Sicral is built by Alenia
Aerospazio and derived from the Italsat series. Its mass is 2596 kg
full, 1253 kg dry and it carries a liquid apogee engine, possibly an
Astrium S400 although I haven't confirmed this yet. Skynet 4F is the
last of the venerable ECS (European Communications Satellite) class of
satellites and was built by Astrium/Stevenage. It carries a Thiokol Star
30 apogee motor and its mass is 1489 kg full, 830 kg dry - a dry mass
more than twice the first OTS. The OTS/ECS satellites were the first
European-developed operational communications satellites, after
groundwork laid by two experimental French/German Symphonie satellites
in the 1970s.

The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, launched in 1992, was switched off on
Feb 2. NASA decided to terminate funding for the mission, even though
the spacecraft was still operating well. EUVE was launched on 1992 June
7 into a 514 km x 528 km x 28.4 deg orbit. It carried three sky survey
scanner EUV telescopes and a deep survey telescope with a 1.4m focal
length and a 2-degree field of view. The sky survey was completed in Jan
1993 and since then EUVE has been used by guest astronomers for
observations of specific targets. Most EUV observations are of nearby
stars and the interstellar medium, since hydrogen absorption makes the
galaxy almost opaque at EUV (0.01-0.09 micron) wavelengths, but a few
extragalactic objects do shine through. The EUVE project was led by
Berkeley, and in 1997 the Center for EUV Astrophysics at Berkeley took
over operational control of the satellite. It is now in a 424 x 433 km x
28.4 deg orbit and will probably reenter next year. The final
observations were made on Jan 26. After end-of-life tests of the
never-used backup high voltage supplies and checking the remaining
battery capacity, EUVE was stabilized pointing away from the Sun and
sent into safehold at 2359 UTC on Jan 31. The transmitters were
commanded off on Feb 2.

History of NASA's Delta-class Explorers
---------------------------------------

Note: I include FUSE since it was originally planned as a Delta Explorer,
and although later descoped it does not fit in other Explorer subcategories.
ISEE-1 was the first Delta-launched Explorer following the ending
of the numbered Explorers.